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The Beast Within

Jul 16, 2025 3:58 AM

Author:Emile Zola

The Beast Within

His haunting, impressionistic study of a man's slow corruption by jealousy, Emile Zola's The Beast Within (La Bete Humaine) is translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Roger Whitehouse in Penguin Classics.

Roubaud is consumed by a jealous rage when he discovers a sordid secret about his young wife's past. The only way he can rest is by forcing her to help him murder the man involved, but there is a witness - Jacques Lantier, a fellow railway employee. Jacques, meanwhile, must contend with his own terrible impulses, for every time he sees a woman he feels the overwhelming desire to kill. In the company of Roubaud's wife, Severine, he finds peace briefly, yet his feelings for her soon bring disasterous consequences. A key work in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, The Beast Within is one of Zola's most dark and violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration of the criminal mind.

Roger Whitehouse's vivid translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing Zola's depiction of the railways, politics and the legal system and the influence of the studies of criminology and the Jack the Ripper murders on his novel. This edition also includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading and notes.

Emile Zola (1840-1902) was the leading figure in the French school of naturalistic fiction. His principal work, Les Rougon-Macquart, is a panorama of mid-19th century French life, in a cycle of 20 novels which Zola wrote over a period of 22 years, including Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), The Beast Within (1890), Nana (1880), and The Drinking Den (1877).

If you enjoyed The Beast Within, you might like Zola's The Drinking Den, also available in Penguin Classics.

Reviews

Masterful, delightfully controlled prose...This highly engaging novel continues to reveal itself long after it is read

—— Sunday Telegraph

Carefully unsentimental...remarkable...we are given the complicated substance of unadorned lives

—— Sunday Times

Compelling... A daring work, sure to gain her greater recognition..the portrait of the ex-soldier Joseph is as fine a depiction of a man in crisis as you will read

—— Daily Telegraph

A remarkable feat... precise and searing... One of the most intelligent and ethical writers of her generation

—— Literary Review

Elegant... Authentic... One of the significant accomplishments of Afterwards is a coiling suspense driven more by psychology than circumstance

—— New York Times

[Afterwards] is about invisible borders, the hard-held Irish border, the border between lovers, between generations, between past and present. It is a fine and profound work

—— Irish Times

Seiffert returns to many of the themes of her first novel, The Dark Room: guilt, grief, memory and forgetting. But Afterwards also asks the questions about how much people can really know about the people they love

—— Independent

Superb...the drama is balanced and the tension sustained...masterful

—— Financial Times

Readers who wonder why... Martin Amis and... Kiran Desai seem to flinch from writing about their own times should study Ms Seiffert

—— Economist

Rachel Seiffert is the poet and spokeswoman of those who find themselves on the wrong side of history...powerful, almost unbearably intense and wonderfully written

—— The Times

A quietly ambitious book

—— Guardian

Despite the halting, low-key narration as Joe and Alice attempt to piece together the terms of their engagement, a simmering tension builds, though Seiffert is admirably less concerned with the revelation of atrocities than in how the soldier, having breached the first commandment, negotiates a return to ordinary life

—— Observer

A beautiful book and it's beautifully written

—— Kit de Waal , Good Housekeeping UK

My favourite book of all time

—— Sareeta Domingo , Good Housekeeping

Morrison's stunning trilogy is an evocation of black life over the past four centuries. It defies summary. Completed almost 25 years ago, these novels top anything produced by any American writer including Hemingway, Updike and DeLillo

—— Trevor Phillips , Sunday Times

[A] beautiful, haunting novel

—— Stig Abell , Sunday Times

More than one of Morrison's books could be classed as masterpieces, but this one is famous for a reason: everyone should read it

—— Bernice McFadden, author of SUGAR , Guardian

A magnificent achievement...an American masterpiece

—— A.S. Byatt , Guardian

A triumph

—— Margaret Atwood , New York Times Book Review

She melds horror and beauty in a story that will disturb the mind forever

—— Sunday Times

Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature

—— New York Review of Books

A work of genuine force. . .Beautifully written

—— Washington Post

There is something great in Beloved: a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you

—— The New Yorker

Superb. . .A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history. . .Exquisitely told

—— Cosmopolitan

This is a wonderful novel about slavery, freedom, parental loss and revenants

—— The Week, Thomas Keneally

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